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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Posted by David at 12:00am

Ground warfare

Series: Honorverse

Date: October 22, 2002

Essentially, all three of these points are normally swatted, as it
were, by the same convention of interstellar war.

In order:

(a) It is very difficult to raise the troops required to
garrison a conquered planet, and as was mentioned in Honor Among Enemies (and
will be mentioned again in later books), the Royal Manticoran Army's appetite for trained
manpower has gone up steadily as more planets were captured. It will continue to rise, and
will become a major source of strain on the Alliance's manpower resources.

(b) You get them to the planet (normally) without taking massive
losses because planets are "required" to surrender once an attacker controls the
high orbitals and is in a position to "fry the surface." The convention runs
something like this:

(1) You can fry the planet with kinetic strikes, and no one on the
planet can stop you;

(2) If you fry the planet, you will kill any hostile garrison
troops, but you will also kill hundreds of thousands (or more) of civilians on any
populated planet;

(3) Indiscriminate (note the qualification!) orbital bombardment is
prohibited by the Eridani Edict and any number of solemn interstellar treaties and
covenants;

(4) The trade-off for being spared indiscriminate bombardment is an
orderly surrender, thus (in the famous 18th century European phrase) "avoiding an
unnecessary effusion of blood";

(5) If a planet refuses to surrender when it has lost
control of the space surrounding it, then the attacker is allowed to use orbital
bombardment to clear his way rather than suffer massive casualties on a point of
principle.

As a consequence of these considerations, the only planets whose
garrisons fight to the finish are usually those which have no significant civilian
population, and even that is extremely rare, since the attacker will usually either ignore
the planet entirely (after all, what harm can it do him once he gets beyond the reach of
any surviving groundbased weapons?) or else sends in the killer crowbars from space and
converts the local ground troops into plasma... in a nice, clean, non-radioactive way, of
course.

(c) Once a planet is occupied, most of the occupation forces are
little more than local policemen, there to maintain civil order. Generally, the real
fighting power of the garrison will be stationed in orbital habitats for quick insertion
with heavy combat equipment and supporting kinetic bombardment capability if required. The
need to supply them will still exist, but quite sizable ground forces can "live off
the land," at least for consumables, when their zone of occupation is an entire
planet.